Right
Guvnor, I'll try and communicate with you in an intelligent fashion.
There are more than sufficient people out there who are happy to fly for the love of it to compensate for loss of those who only fly because its an overpaid job.
Frankly, £1,500 nett for someone on the bottom of the ladder is not a bad whack at all
I love flying, so say I spent £60,000 on my ab initio training then another £10,000 (guess) on my multi-crew CRM course I'd be £70,000 + accumulating interest in debt before I even wrote to MO'L for a job. He'd then make me pay for my conversion course and all in all I'd end up about £85-100,000 in debt (incl. the cost of living whilst training) by the time I took home my first FR pay cheque of £1500 "as someone on the bottom of the ladder". But that doesn't matter because I love flying.
Those debts are going to be impossible to pay off on my salary and the future doesn't look quite as rosy as it did when I grew up, unless my name's MO'L of course who's employed me as a fully qualified First Officer with just the cost of some route training and heck those flights had to be operated anyway! But that doesn't matter because I love flying, hell I'll even pay for my uniform...
I'm now flying 900 hrs a year as a new First Officer on my shiny new B737-800/rusting old B737-200 (can you imagine 900 hrs on a -200!). I'm getting tired, and just managing to keep ahead of the a/c; Christ there's alot of people down the back depending on me and I've only got 500 hrs. Still at least the company appreciates the responsibility that I have for our customers and the company's future. Oh hang on, they don't they pay me less than a photocopier engineer. Oh silly me, what should I expect I'm at the bottom of the ladder and I've only spent £100,000 getting there; what a generous man I am saving all that money for MO'L, but it's worth it because I love flying.
